On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 11:59 +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote: > No. Configuring a user computer should be left to end-user, not to > packagers providing 'just click here' blackbox solutions. One of the reaons I switched, years ago, away from Debian to Mandrake Linux, was exactly this: debian packages tended not to work out of the box, because they said it was the responsibility of the user to configure them. On Mandrake Linux, the corresponding packages had a sensible, working, default configuration you could change if you needed to, and sometimes even GUI tools that worked with the same text-based conf files, so you could mix GUI and text styles. On Red Hat Linux at the time if you used the GUI tools they overwrote text configuration files without reading them first, so just starting the tool was often enough to lose manual changes.
Software should "just work" wherever possible. Where not possible, it's the responsibility of the software provider to make it easy to configure in a safe and secure way without the user undergoing emotional trauma. Don't expect to "educate" users by forcing them to learn irritating and tedious trivia that stand between them and their job without being part of what they actually want to learn. Of course, this should be balanced by providing paths for people who do want to learn. When a book is translated, the original language, title and author must always be given, so that if the reader wishes to learn Urdu (say) and read the original, they can; however, most people want to read books in languages in which they are already fluent. Best, Liam -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
